It Looked Good on Paper

We could make the payments. Everything seemed great. We got all the loans.  I felt trapped in such a small house and did not have a community to share that with. It was one of my reasons for starting this blog. Everyone in town that I had any exposure to had real houses or so it seemed to me at the time. It was the main reason I went back to work full time.  Now fast forward.

Here we are over a year after everything is complete. The house looks great, but it is still a modest house.  But the money keeps going out. We have come to a place where all the payments can be made, but if people only knew what we were paying out a month. They would be shocked. It is like we are paying two mortgages. We have the mortgage, which we refinanced to a fifteen year almost three years ago to save money. So it was a good decision but made our mortgage higher. We also have a series of different loans that we are paying out. They all have different end dates and interest rates.   The largest loan still has four and a half years on it.  So we have to keep this up for another four and a half years. Watching each penny and breathing very slowly.

Did we do the right thing?  Some would say no. We couldn't afford it and should not have done it. I would say what we did was not the worst decision. Yes, it looked better on paper than it feels each month,but we can make our payments. Selling seemed challenging when we started this process. Real estate came up quick, but we were underwater for years. Buying another house in the town we live in would have cost us a lot. We would not have found much that didn't need a face lift for under $550,000. We did not want to start all over with a 30 year mortgage at our ages.

It looked good on paper, but it feels stressful sometimes.